He reckons it's far too late now to heed the warnings.
The end of blue fin tuna and the relative decline of the American nation
Don't cause him much consternation.
(The row over Obama's bow to the emperor is somehow not worth worrying about now)
He's not even that fussed about gaijin in Japan, the place of women in the home
or his own metabolic syndrome.
Because he has no doubt
the oil's running out
and so is uranium (which rhymes with cranium, but little else).
4 comments:
A nitpicky comment: "peak oil" does not mean that oil running out, strictly speaking, just that it becomes too expensive to use as a fuel.
And you're right about the uranium; if we'd start building fission reactors now to replace oil, the last batch of power plants built would not be able to run their designed lifetime as we'd run out of fuel to use in them.
And that's before you take the reality of uranium mining into account. Makes a coal strip mine look like a national park by comparison. A fair amount of known uranium deposits will never be mined, simply because of the impact on the local environment.
Well, OK, but that implies there's just oodles and boodles of the stuff that if only we were clever enough we could get at it cheaply. More important is that it costs almost as much energy to get, for example, oil out of shale, as the energy it can release, thus making it not a question of expense, but common sense. And that does rhyme.
"[...]but that implies there's just oodles and boodles of the stuff that if only we were clever enough we could get at it cheaply."
There is. For pretty fundamental reasons, the peak happens when about half is still left. Improvementis in extraction technology is sort of built in to the model already.
We're not running out as such, but production is no longer able to keep up with demand. Which causes heavy price increases that shuts out the lower-value uses - such as burning it up for heat - out of the market.
"More important is that it costs almost as much energy to get, for example, oil out of shale, as the energy it can release, "
Not relevant. Gasoline already takes more energy to produce and deliver than you get out of it in the end. As long as you have other energy sources - nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas, whatever - to produce the finished stuff it's fins.
We have lots of energy of all kinds. The problem is not having energy, but getting it to where and when we want to use it. The reason everybody loves oil is because it's such a good energy carrier: it's very energy dense, you can store it for years and years without losing the energy, and you can transport it very easily.
And if you think of it as an energy carrier it doesn't matter if you need to use other energy sources to prepare it; it's effectively transforming electricity into a form much more convenient for transport and storage.
There's even people seriously suggesting that we should synthesise fuel oil from scratch, precisely because it's a much, much better carrier than batteries and such, and we already have the infrastructure to deal with it on a large scale.
Mostly agree, but one thing Our Man is not convinced about that there is enough of the other power sources around - "As long as you have other energy sources - nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas, whatever..."
Er correct Ourmani if he's wrong (he probably is...) But:
Nukes are problematic even if there was enough uranium left
Wind farms are nightmares
Solar power doesn't work as advertised
Natural gas - no one knows how much is left
Whatever - biomass/burning rubbish/geo thermal sink holes, dams - are any of these gonna do the trick?
Post a Comment